Clarity PPM - Export to Excel hyperlinks generate a 404 or 401 error when you click on them

Products

• Clarity PPM SaaS
• Clarity PPM On Premise

Issue/Introduction

Export to Excel from Clarity PPM - hyperlinks generate a 404 or 401 error when you click on them.  The # symbol in the url is replaced with %20-%20

 

Environment

This problem can occur in Excel or any Office product.  It can occur in either IE or Chrome.

Cause

This is a known problem with Microsoft Office. See the link on the bottom of the page regarding a discussion on the Microsoft Forum for several workarounds/fixes.

Resolution

Fixes/workarounds that must be applied for each user that has the problem:

1.  Change the default browser to Firefox.  The change the default browser back to IE.

 

2.  See the link under Additional information for other possible workarounds/fixes.

 

Workaround that can be applied at the CA PPM level and will prevent the #symbol from being present in Export to Excel and email links:

1.  Open the properties.xml file in the \config folder in your CA PPM directory.

2.  Locate the section that starts with <applicationServer

3.  Locate the parameter that looks like externalURL=""

4.  Paste the following between the two quotes:  replace(/niku/nu#action:,/niku/app?action=,${entryurl})

Note: After entering the above property entry, make sure that there are no spaces in the entry -- otherwise, the change may not take effect

5.  Save your changes.

6.  If there is more than one server in your cluster, repeat steps 1 -5 for each server.

7.  Restart the app and bg services on all servers.

 

This will change the format of your URLs in Export to Excel and system generated email links to a different format that is still recognized by CA PPM that does not contain a # symbol.  This completely avoids the problem.

Additional Information

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2013_release-word/word-2013-hyperlink-converting-to-20-20/4e8a2e8d-b889-4c77-8276-551b11e296d4?auth=1